July 27, 2014

ANOTHER PRESS RELEASE ON CAMPUS KANGAROO COURTS FROM PROF. JOHN BANZHAF:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 22, 2014): A female student – whose complaint that Swarthmore violated Title IX by ignoring her report about rape triggered major changes in how the school handles date-rape cases – has now come out in strong support of a male student whose law suit is challenging those very procedures as unfair, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Banzhaf has been studying a new legal movement in which males found guilty of date rape are then successfully suing their colleges, sometimes under the same Title IX which triggered the problem.

Moreover, even those who are sympathetic to the problem of campus date rape, and are in charge of the campus adjudication process, are now recognizing that it can be unfair if not illegal.

For example, the director of the Association of Title IX Administrators bluntly warned that some male students may have been improperly penalized.

“Some boards and panels still can’t tell the difference between drunk sex and a policy violation,” he wrote. “We are making Title IX plaintiffs out of these men.”

In the Swarthmore case, “John Doe” and “Jane Row” had two sexual encounters in 2011 which did not involve intercourse. Subsequently, the male and female had intercourse, which the woman agrees was consensual.

But, 19 months after the fact, she suddenly claimed that the two earlier episodes had been coerced. The school originally thoroughly investigated and then cleared the man in January 2013 without even filing disciplinary charges.

However, sometime thereafter, the student newspaper published articles charging that women who reported rape felt revictimized by the college’s failure to take their complaints seriously, and Mia Ferguson’s highly publicized Title IX complaint against Swarthmore went public. Less than two weeks later, Swarthmore told the male, a law student, that they had reopened a complaint filed against him a year earlier.

Then, after an emotional hearing before a panel made up of faculty, staff, and students, he was expelled. His attorney charges that the inference is clear. “To correct one wrong – its past unresponsiveness to female complaints – [Swarthmore] committed another wrong against John based on his gender . . . He was a male accused of sexual misconduct at the wrong time and in the wrong place.” Mia agrees.

Swarthmore has subsequently changed its adjudication procedures, and now has such cases heard before and decided by a retired judge; a tacit admission, suggests Banzhaf, that its former procedure had serious problems.

Male students have already used legal action successfully at Brown (2X), Central College, Denison, Duke (2X) , George Washington, Holy Cross, Occidental, Saint Joseph, University of the South, and Xavier.

I a little surprised at how quickly we're hearing about changes and all this 'pondering' the issues at universities. It shows that some firm pushback, especially of the lawsuit variety, *does* make a difference.

This is what the university tells them to do. They go for counseling or they turn to someone they know for help, or they see a flyer posted on the wall - "Sexual Assault? Call campus hotline..." - and they start the process.

And that process, by university policy, does not involve the police. They physically can call the cops, of course, but they are told not to, that the university will handle everything. If you have no reason to believe the university won't investigate honestly - and these problems with university procedures have not been publicized until pretty recently, and still aren't universally known - then you'll probably do what you're advised to by sympathetic authority figures in the same room, who assure you that they will take care of the situation on your behalf, and that it would be "against policy" for you to talk to the police.

Please explain to me why any male college student would even consider a relationship with a woman from his own campus, where he is vulnerable to the PC policies of the college, and is subject to their kangaroo courts. Far better to see a woman from another institution, where any complaint would have to be adjudicated by legal means, giving the accused a role in his own defense.

So we are overjoyed that a facially illegal as well as substantively illegal system is going to be "reformed" into a facially legal but still substantively illegal system. Really.

This has always been, and still is even after "reform", a political operation by campus gender feminists to gain the power to prevent heterosexual males from getting college degrees unless they jump through the necessary feminist sensitivity hoops. Nobody who has not been cleared by the local feminist Gauleiter will be permitted to join the Elite.

Maybe the way to get college students to act more like adults would be to treat them more like adults by lowering the drinking age to 18. Also, repeal laws that encourage false claims and stupid behavior by college administrators, such as Title IX.

InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.